


A Recipe For A Black Hole

by GlitterDwarf



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-23
Updated: 2011-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-24 21:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitterDwarf/pseuds/GlitterDwarf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And suddenly, without warning, Dan Humphrey is thirty-three years old, single, and living in a studio apartment in Encino, California.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Recipe For A Black Hole

And suddenly, without warning, Dan Humphrey is thirty-three years old, single, and living in a studio apartment in Encino, California.

#

Jenny can only sigh at Dan from across the country. He can picture her in his mind’s eye so clearly, her big, hooded eyes rimmed to death with charcoal, her dirty blonde (blonde dirty?) hair pulled back and up and away and somehow still there, her long nails digging into something or another, and her face just so, so disapproving. 

“There’s something wrong with you,” she proclaims, as though this is something Dan hasn’t known his entire existence. 

“Anything specific?” he asks, hoping that his voice doesn’t sound quite as acerbic as he is feeling (and simultaneously hoping that it does).

“Only everything,” Jenny sighs (again) dramatically.

“You know, you’re starting to sound more and more like your daughter,” Dan points out, hoping that this will drive his little sister into an angry frenzy. As much as she loves Amelia, Dan isn’t sure that anybody would want to be compared to a preteen girl.  
“I’m hanging up on you.”

Dan laughs as he hears the familiar click of a phone line going dead.

#

“It’s good,” Dan’s agent finally concedes. “It’s just too, well. There’s too many words.”  
Dan’s mind halts. For once, he has the opposite problem than the one just pointed out to him.

“Any suggestions?” he asks, not one to argue with the person in charge of his entire screenwriting career.

Juanita shrugs. 

“Got anything else?” she asks.

Dan shrugs.

#

“I’ve sent in reinforcements,” Lily warns all-too late. Too late for Dan to flee the state, anyway, as he is sure that his little sister is about to show up on his doorstep with her daughter and husband in tow, ready to commence the ass-kicking with her six inch, leather pumps.

For this reason, Dan opens his door with a mixture of trepidation and the musing of whether or not he can duck quick enough.

“Humphrey,” Blair says cooly while she breezes past him into his apartment. “You’re looking quaint.”

Dan suddenly has the feeling that he didn’t duck quick enough.

#

“Your hair is thinning,” Blair points out. “How lower class.”

Dan furrows his brow in response.

“And you’re here because-?” 

Blair smiles and sips her Starbucks with a pinky out. How upper class.

“Because you’re life is in shambles, Humphrey, and you need a guide, a fairy godmother, if you will, somebody to take you by the hand and fix up the mess you’ve made.”

“That doesn’t explain why  _you’re_  here,” Dan points out. “Besides, my life is not in shambles or disorder or disorientation or other synonyms, it’s just stalled or stifled or something similar.” 

Blair just smiles back in that way where she seems absent but is really, he knows, calculating her next move. 

“Yes, well, illogical alliteration aside, it’s time to face the facts, Humphrey- it’s been four years since your last movie has made festival rounds and, let’s be honest, a bleeding-heart story about a southern girl who’s trying to make it big and fails isn’t quite creative. Before that it was, if I recall, something about a young boy’s obsession with a certain blonde girl which is way too close to home for it to have a modicum of impartial quality to it, and besides, you live in, well,” Blair looked around as she finally paused for breath. “A shithole.”

Dan definitely didn’t duck quick enough.

“Yes, but-“ Dan starts, but Blair, always the quicker, cuts him off.

“-and to answer your incessant question: I am here because, if you’ll recall, we were almost friends once, and almost-friends need to look out for each other.” She paused, looked around, and smiled that familiar, conspiratorial smile. “I’m also using you as the topic for my next editor’s article.”

“How philanthropic of you.”

“Yes, I do love the look of ‘Wasting Away Again in Nowheresville’ as a title.”

“Encino is a step away from Hollywood. We even have an  _Arclight._ ”

“And Hollywood is a step away from Tijuana. I don’t see your point.”

#

And suddenly, without warning, Dan Humphrey is Blair Waldorf’s bitch.

#

“You could stop laughing, you know,” Dan points out to his little sister, who has been laughing for the past four minutes without stopping. 

She doesn’t.

“I’m hanging up,” Dan threatens. When this only makes Jenny’s laughter more raucous, Dan makes good on his threat.

He sighs and stares at his phone for a moment, an instant too long. He thinks about the one name in there that he hasn’t spoken to in four years, the one name that he hasn’t been able to bring himself to call. The number that, for all he knows, could be disconnected, or changed. The number that, if dialed successfully, if it is still linked to the right person, would lead to Serena no-longer-Van-der-Woodsen. 

“What are you doing?” 

Blair’s voice cuts through the silence of the room like a serial killer. A serial killer of peace and quiet. Which she pretty much is.

Dan drops his phone. Before it even hits the ground, he can practically hear the impending crunch as the aesthetically beautiful yet shoddy workmanship of his post-2020 cell demolishes before his very eyes.

Blair gasps, then shrugs.

“You needed an upgrade anyway, Humphrey.”

“How did you know that?”

“Silly how you ask me questions you would be upset to know the answer to,” she says as she walks away.

#

“Did you come up with more to show me?” Juanita asks Dan one day over a conference call. Dan opens his mouth, trying to form together words to explain exactly what has been going on his life lately.

Blair gets to it first.

“He’s been focusing on cleaning up his life for the past few weeks,” she explains calmly. “He isn’t scheduled to begin writing until late next week.”

The other line is silent for a moment.

“Fair enough,” Juanita finally concedes. “It’s about time Dan got himself a girlfriend anyway.”

And, as the two quickly explain at the same time that they are not together, Juanita hangs up.

It’s been going around a lot lately, apparently.

#

Dan, finally, writes a poem. He hasn’t done this in years, put pen to paper and make something flow, something beautiful, and something magical happen. Sure, he is a professional screenwriter now, which means that he (theoretically) writes for a living. But that doesn’t mean that what he writes isn’t dreck, isn’t refuse, isn’t worth the paper it’s (theoretically) printed on. He writes things that are cliché, and Hollywood eats them up, and they make festival rounds, and people put Iron & Wine and bands with the name “Wolf” in their title as the soundtrack, and everybody’s happy. Except for Dan.

Except.

 _It’s kind of like-  
When you’re sitting at the bus stop-  
And the tower of light next to you flickers-  
Softly flickers-  
To life-_

It’s titled “What it feels like to fall in love with you, just so you will know.”

Just like that, his writer’s block is broken, and a flood of words comes rushing into his brain, and he is  _free._

#

And suddenly, without warning, Dan Humphrey realizes that he has written a love poem about Blair Waldorf.

#

“So what’s it like living with the scariest girl on the Upper East Side?” Jenny asks his one night, a few days after his first post-Blair screenplay is sold.

He pauses, trying to measure his words.  
 _  
It’s like-  
When you’re sitting at the bus stop-_

“You’re in love with her,” Jenny explains to Dan.

Dan fumbles.

“Perhaps, but I did also love Serena not-Van-der-Woodsen for years of my life, so we all know my track record and its success rate. It’s something like an inverse relationship to my success.”

Jenny laughs.

“Dan, you were never that successful. In anything.”

Dan shrugs before realizing that Jenny can’t see him.

#

“How’s Chuck Bass?” Dan asks one night, finally releasing the words he has been keeping in his head for weeks on end. Blair looks up from her meticulous nail-filing, and Dan can see that she is genuinely taken aback.

“He’s fine, I suppose. Between Nate, Bass Industries and Sweetie, I’m sure he has his hands quite full.”

“Sweetie?”

“Nate and Chuck’s gold monkey,” Blair says. “They needed something that says ‘we’re queer and we have a lot of money,’ after all.”

Dan laughed, naturally, and loudly, and, surprisingly, with happiness.

 _It’s like-  
When you realize everybody you’ve ever been jealous of is no competition-  
And then-_

#

“There’s nothing more I can do for you, Humphrey,” Blair says with a smile. “You’re finally on your feet again.”

Dan leans down and kisses her, then, and it’s short but it means something, it means a lot, and he knows that Blair knows it.

And then.  
 _  
It’s like-  
When everything finally happens-_

Blair kisses him back.

#

And suddenly, without warning, Dan Humphrey is living.


End file.
